What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

From Collected Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, published by Harper & Brothers Publishers. Copyright © 1956 by Norma Millay Ellis.

Instead, the poem is full of competent trees,

sturdy and slow-growing. The trees live on a wide

clean lawn full of adults. All night, the adults grow

older without somersaulting or spinning. They grow

old while thinking about themselves. They sleep well

and stay out late, their nerves coiled neatly inside

their grown bodies. They don’t think about children

because children were never there to begin with.

The children were not killed or stolen. This is absence,

not loss. There is a world of difference: the distance

between habitable worlds. It is the space that is

unbearable. The poem is relieved not to have to live

in it. Instead, its heart ticks perfectly unfretfully

among the trees. The children who are not in the poem

do not cast shadows or spells to make themselves

appear. When they don’t walk through the poem, time

does not bend around them. They are not black holes.

There are already so many nots in this poem, it is already

so negatively charged. The field around the poem

is summoning children and shadows and singularities

from a busy land full of breathing and mass. My non-

children are pulling children away from their own

warm worlds. They will arrive before I can stop them.

When matter meets anti-matter, it annihilates into

something new. Light. Sound. Waves and waves

of something like water. The poem’s arms are so light

they are falling upward from the body. Why are you crying?

Copyright © 2020 by Claire Wahmanholm. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 25, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.